International Conference Bochum
embodiment.blogs.rub.de
8-9 July 2016
English Department

DJH Jugendherberge
HumboldtstraĂ&#x;e 59-63
Bochum | Germany

International Conference Bochum
embodiment.blogs.rub.de
8-9 July 2016

Embodiment, Perception,
and Critical Practice

Program

Friday, July 8
9.00-9.30

Welcome

9.30-10.30

Panel 1
Rebecca Longtin Hansen
State University of New York at New Paltz
Lived Meaning: Embodiment and Art in Dilthey and Merleau-Ponty
Alexander Flaß Ruhr-Universität Bochum
“I Am Multitudes”: Towards a Cultural Phenomenology in
Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World
Chair: Heike Steinhoff

Alexandra Berlina Universität Duisburg/Essen
Flesh Made Strange:
Ostranenie of the Human Body in Anglophone Fiction
A hundred years ago, the Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky published
“Art as Device,” in which he coined the concept of ostranenie. Our perception, he
writes, is deadened when body and the embodied mind are exposed to routine:
“And so, what we call art exists in order to give back the sensation of life, in order
to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony. The goal of art is to create
the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things; the method of art is
the ‘ostranenie’ of things and the complication of the form, which increases the
duration and complexity of perception, as the process of perception is its own
end in art and must be prolonged” (translation by Alexandra Berlina).
The paper will begin by arguing that formalism as practiced by Shklovsky
had much in common with approaches that are often construed as its opposite,
ranging from reader-response studies to sociocultural, evolutionary and, above
all, cognitive frameworks. Far from dealing with texts in a vacuum, Shklovsky
constantly speaks about the mind and the body; contemporary psychological and
neurological research has much in common with his ideas.
Having delineated this context, the paper will proceed to discuss the
ostranenie of the human body in Anglophone literary texts ranging from Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels and Brontë’s Vilétte to Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and
Amis’ Other People.
Alexandra Berlina is the author of Brodsky Translating Brodsky: Poetry in SelfTranslation (2014), the editor and translator of the forthcoming Viktor Shklovksy: A
Reader (2016) and the laureate of several translation awards. Born in Moscow, she
studied in London, taught American literature in Essen and is currently holding a
post-doc position in literary studies at the University of Erfurt. She is working on a
book on ostranenie and cognition.

Liane F. Carlson Princeton University
Lung Disease and Luck: On the Critical Limits of Contingency
This paper explores a neglected bodily heritage of a key concept in cultural
studies: contingency. For many thinkers in cultural studies, such as Judith
Butler, Foucault and those interested in genealogy, contingency is understood
in temporal terms as events that could have been otherwise. This tradition
understands contingency to have subversive political implications, arguing that
it allows us to understand seemingly natural categories—such as race, sex, and
religion—to be the product of undetermined historical events. Because such

categories could have been otherwise, the argument runs, they still could be
otherwise. Thus, contingency at once critiques the status quo and holds open the
possibility of a better, less restrictive future.
Yet speaking about the contingency or necessity of history in sweeping
terms obscures the reality of suffering on the ground by those whose lives were
upended by contingency. Paradoxically, a concept meant to hold open hope for
the marginalized becomes yet another theory of meta-history that flattens the
lived experience of suffering bodies. Accordingly, this paper seeks to reground
contingency in the specificity of human experience by returning to a neglected
understanding of contingency that claims we feel most acutely the fragility
of contingency through the body’s vulnerability to the external world and the
passions as they ambush the soul.
In order to flesh out the stakes of this alternative, bodily conception of
contingency, this presentation focuses on the work of contemporary philosopher
Havi Carel on the phenomenology of illness. In 2006, at the age of 35, Carel
was diagnosed with a degenerative lung disease that came with a prognosis of
death in ten years. Between the first and second editions of her book Illness,
new medication was developed that arrested the course of her disease, allowing
Carel to become a mother. When reflecting back on these developments in the
preface to the second edition, Carel ended by voicing her awareness of her own
contingency: “But I am also deeply conscious of the precariousness of life and the
extraordinary luck that brought about the two events. I remain acutely aware that
it could have been otherwise.”
Placed in the context of Carel’s book, there are three reasons why her bodily
infirmity opened her to a greater awareness of her contingency. 1) The rapid onset
of her illness meant she was constantly straining to do activities out of sheer,
bodily habit that were no longer in her power. Thus, in every movement she was
thrown up against the knowledge of how different her life could have been, had
she never fallen ill. 2) The diminishment of her powers also altered her experience
of space. She was constantly forced to grapple with the gap between the
distances she used to be able to traverse easily and her new, affective experience
of the same space insurmountably far or steep. 3) Her horizon of lived time
contracted. Thus, desires that had seemed modest in her previous life, such as the
wish for a child, suddenly seemed unreasonably dependent on good fortune.
The paper ends by suggesting Carel’s experience of illness at once expands
our understanding of contingency and pushes against any easy narrative of its
revolutionary potential.
Liane F. Carlson received her PhD in philosophy of religion from Columbia
University in 2015. She is currently Stewart Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in
Religion at Princeton University. Her research interests include the philosophical
and theological history of Critical Theory, with particular emphasis on German
Romanticism, phenomenology, the limits of the critical power of history, the
problem of evil, and the intersection of religion and literature.

Sandra Danneil Technische Universität Dortmund
Bodies of Unpleasure: Von Trier and The Dark Side of Seriality
Whether students or my parents, my environment has always been wary
about my cinephilic preferences, which led them to the question: ”Why do
you watch those films?“ By those films, people mean films that follow paths of
articulate unease and affective irritation. After years of film theoretical research
and a considerable number of motion pictures, I cannot stop wondering why the
masses are still yearning for the pleasures of fictitious stability; and I cannot stop
thinking of those others who are looking for a distinctly different experience,
because those (like me) are searching for unpleasure.
What I would call unpleasure adds up to the theoretical corpus around
what Williams termed “body genres” and complements it with a whole new
vocabulary. Not only has the latest fashion of the New Extremity brought up a
new sensibility within radicalized auteurism; the films that I put under scrutiny in
this category, and among them Von Trier’s Antichrist and Nymphomaniac, have
moreover established a new understanding of extreme physicality, of visceral
sensitivity, and of nauseating the viewer in unpleasurable ways, be it aesthetically,
due to narrative strategies or the ambivalence of motifs and topics.
Why does SHE (Charlotte Gainsbourg) unleash our ethical hell, when she uses
her excessive sexual nature to punish her female abjection. Why do we feel guilty
when we watch Joe’s (Charlotte Gainsbourg) insatiable craving, getting lubricated
at the deathbed of her father? In my talk I approach unexplored territory, on
which the promise for pleasure takes on a different form of bodily experience.
By arguing that in Von Trier’s Antichrist and Nymphomaniac seriality functions
as a capitalization of “commercial continuation,” I approach Von Trier’s recent
films exemplarily by looking at the films’ framed bodies as reference for a wider
truth: How is satisfaction corrupted by a physical bluntness? What kinds of
different affect(s) are inscribed in the excessive nature of the corporeal? In how
far becomes unpleasure both an addictive quality and a serial policy, which brings
its viewer to his/her borders of concern, shame, and will to ethical investment.
I myself belong to an audience that wants conventional satisfaction to be
withheld and I am thus looking for what I would call unpleasure. To me, the
viewers’ repetitive desire for unpleasure seems thereby based on a need to
experience the unpleasant through feeling rather than seeing only and where
every different ‘again’ is always a new ‘more’. To feel the loss of stability in the
depicted body puts into question the precarious status of myself, i.e. the subject
that is looking and thereby exposes its limited stability.
In the study of serial unpleasure, Lars von Trier’s auteur cinema puts on
another layer to the conventions of capitalist consumption and the status of the
ecstatic body in popular media culture. In his films, I argue, the pornographic is by
no means taken as a commercial bracket, but creates an alliance with the tainted
desire of its audience to unravel its psychosocial identity behind bare satisfaction.

Sandra Danneil has an M.A. in Film and Television Studies from the Ruhr
University of Bochum and received a B.A. for Teacher Education in German and
English. She is a Ph.D. candidate and a faculty member of Cultural Studies and
the Media at the Institute of American Studies at TU Dortmund University. In her
dissertation project Sandra Danneil works on comedy theories of Transgression
and Liminality in the American sitcom The Simpsons. She worked in the film and
television industry for several years and dedicated much of her time to writing
about gender issues involving new masculinities, pornography, and the New
Extremity. Besides teaching courses in Cultural and Media Studies, she is also
involved in the extensive Dortmund-USA exchange program, organizer of the
annual Ruhr Ph.D. Forum of the UAR, and equal opportunity officer of the Faculty
of Cultural Sciences at TU Dortmund University.

Alexander Flaß Ruhr-Universität Bochum
“I Am Multitudes”: Towards a Cultural Phenomenology
in Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World
Siri Hustvedt’s sixth novel The Blazing World (2014) has a focus on the
gender bias deeply ingrained in New York’s art world. Crafted as an academic
investigation, the American writer presents the character Harriet “Harry” Burden,
a passionate artist and intellectual, whose astutely conducted experiment
unveils how the term ‘female genius’ amounts to a cultural oxymoron in a maledominated industry. However, aside from the art establishment’s institutional
misogyny, the narrative subtly investigates the underlying root of discriminatory
tendencies, that is, the habitual intricacies of human perception and how
unconscious ideas about cultural categories fundamentally shape a person’s
reception and understanding of a given work of art.
Yet, on another layer, by contrasting notions of autonomous and definitive
self-presence, the novel raises questions concerning the ambiguities of our bodily
being-in-the-world. Drawing on concepts of intersubjectivity and the dialectical
structure of identity formation within the existentialist phenomenological
tradition, the narrative addresses the complex and dynamic facets of the
constitution of self.
Building on what the anthropologist Thomas J. Csordas has termed ‘cultural
phenomenology’—a method of inquiry that aims at bridging “the immediacy
of embodied experience with the multiplicity of cultural meaning in which we
are always and inevitably immersed” (Perspectives on Embodiment 143)—I will
argue that, by pointing to the ambiguous and transgressive nature of identity
categories, The Blazing World intricately opposes both atomist and essentialist
interpretations concerning the mode of human existence. Instead of joining
the ranks of (radical) constructivist thought, however, Hustvedt gives Butlerian
theory of body performativity a phenomenological twist, for her narrative subtly

explores the fundamentally intersubjective nature of how our embodied minds
encounter the world. Thus, apart from exposing the pervasive sexism in the world
of art, Harriet Burden’s pseudonymous masks do not disguise but reveal the
inherently dialogic character of her artistic creation. The novel’s trajectory goes
beyond clear-cut distinctions between art and reality, however, for it also puts
into question other binaries such as nature/culture, subject/object, or self/other,
that are so deeply rooted within Western academic discourses.
Alexander Flaß is a graduate student and research assistant in the English and
American Studies Program at the Ruhr University Bochum. Presently, he is
working on his master’s thesis on selected writings by Siri Hustvedt, in which
he offers a phenomenological reading of her recent fiction and non-fiction
texts, focusing on Merleau-Pontian body concepts as well as feminist notions of
gendered embodiment. His research interests include: Cultural Studies, Disability
Studies, Embodiment and Merleau-Pontian Phenomenology, Spatial Theory,
Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory

Sarah A. Garrigan Tufts University
Embodying Confusion in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood
Modernist texts are famously difficult, preventing a reader from reading the
text straightforwardly and thereby creating confusion and uncertainty. I argue
that this confusion is an imperative critical tool that forces readers outside of their
familiar paradigms and can therefore be used to invigorate literary study. Building
on Eve Sedgwick’s practice of reparative reading and Rita Felski’s practice of
reflective reading, I argue that that confused reading provides another method
for exploring both how and why texts mean. Confused reading modulates
between cognition and affect, working within a hazy space that has elements of
both extremes. Our best work as both critics and common readers, I argue, must
take place within this paradigm. I use Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood as a text that calls
for this type of reading, arguing that it advocates a reading practice that rejects
traditional coherence and understanding in favor of bodily affect and aesthetic
pleasure. Barnes uses the character of Robin Vote to destabilize categorization
by offering confusing and contradictory depictions of Robin that refuse to reify
her, as those around her constantly attempt to do. As readers, we are put into
the position of other characters that attempt to control Robin by understanding
her, but our initial confusion and frustration at not being able to place her in a
category is dissipated by the lyrical qualities of Barnes’ prose and the subsequent
affect these qualities evoke in the readerly body. When we learn to read not for
understanding alone but also for feeling, when we deny the easy satisfaction that
comes with categorization for a reading experience that can accept not knowing,

we can begin to appreciate Robin’s own journey through Nightwood to a similar
place of knowledge rejection.
Sarah Garrigan is a Ph.D. candidate at Tufts University currently working on a
dissertation on the aesthetics of confusion in American and British modernist
novels. She has previously delivered papers on E.M. Forster, Henry James, Virginia
Woolf at the Northeastern Modern Language Association Conference, the
Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Conference, and the Nomadikon
Conference.

Rebecca Longtin Hansen State University of New York at New Paltz
Lived Meaning: Embodiment and Art in Dilthey and Merleau-Ponty
This paper takes up the philosophy of Dilthey and Merleau-Ponty to explore
the relation between meaning and lived experience as it is grounded in the body
and expressed in art. Both Dilthey and Merleau-Ponty present the body as a nexus
of lived meanings and the source of understanding. As our understanding of the
world is grounded in the body, rather than in the mind as an isolated res cogitans,
meaning is not simply conceptual or intellectual in nature. Meaning is embodied.
For both thinkers, art takes up these embodied meanings and finds expression for
them.
Dilthey describes our relation to the external world in terms of resistance,
a tactile, bodily relation. Here Dilthey argues against Descartes’ problem of the
external world and the idea that external objects are “projections of sensations
into an outer visual or auditory space.”1 Dilthey calls this concept of projection
“superfluous” because the separation of self and world is secondary to our
relation to the world and must be established through the experience of external
objects resisting us. Dilthey describes this resistance through the body—“a self
begins to set itself apart from the objects within this spatial reality, as a body, as
delineated and oriented in space” (SW II 25). For Dilthey, the self is dynamically
formed through one’s bodily relation to the world. Resistance, a lived and felt
relation to the world, cannot be completely theorized or articulated, but it can be
explored and expressed through art.
Similarly, for Merleau-Ponty perception, understanding, and meaning are
all rooted in the body: “The thing, and the world, are given to me along with
the parts of my body … in a living connection …”2 The body presents itself as a
synthesis of sensations, an intersection of relations. The body “is a nexus of living
meanings, not the law for certain number of covariant terms”, which means that
it cannot be reduced to functions and separate operations but must be seen as a
meaningful whole (PoP 175). In “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty calls the body an
“enigma” insofar as it is the center of a “complex system of exchanges.”3 For this

reason, Merleau-Ponty posits that “[t]he body is to be compared, not to a physical
object, but rather to a work of art” (PoP 174). Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology
uses art to understand the dynamics of embodiment and the relation between
the self and world.
For both thinkers, art engages in this fundamental connectivity between the
body and world. Art thus embodies our existence and makes its meaning palpable
and tangible.
1 Wilhelm Dilthey, The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its
Justification, trans. Maximilian Aue, Understanding the Human World, Wilhelm Dilthey Selected
Works, vol. II, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjob Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2010), 8 – 57. Henceforth cited as SW II.
2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, (London and New
York: Routledge, 2002) 237. Henceforth cited in the text as PoP followed by page number.
3 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind” in Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting,
trans. Michael B. Smith, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1993), 121 –
149. 125.

Rebecca Longtin Hansen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the State
University of New York at New Paltz. Her work examines the intersection of
phenomenology and aesthetic theory, especially insofar as works of art allow
phenomenological insight into the nature of experience.

Alexandra Hartmann Universität Paderborn
The (In)visibility of Embodied Blackness
What is the black body? Ever since the forced arrival of African Americans in
the New World, this question has yielded a range of answers, to a large extent
accounting for the enslavement of blacks, their liberation, but also continued
marginalization in the 21st century. Both blacks and whites alike have pointed to
the supposedly obvious ontological characteristics of the black body. Whites
have referenced the black body in order to justify inequalities and to show the
rightfulness of white supremacy. Advocating black exceptionalism and the
superiority of African Americans and their culture, influential black intellectuals
ranging from W.E.B. DuBois to Martin Luther King have similarly drawn from
notions of ontological blackness as Cornel West illustrates (Prophesy Deliverance!
70). Thoughts like these continue to shape contemporary discussions of social
justice for blacks and frequently serve as the basis of, for instance, New York’s
stop and frisk law and racial profiling. However, African Americans, I would argue,
have always also stressed the phenomenal character of the black body, revealing
a long tradition of engaging ideas of embodiment. Frederick Douglass’ 1845
Narrative already explores how the bodily experience of resistance influences
cognition and leads to a positive self-perception. The body has an impact on the
world while it is impacted by it at the same time. This is a rejection of the sharp
mind/body dualism typical of Western literature and philosophy.

Taking Ralph Ellison’s 1952 Invisible Man that I read as a black humanist
work as a starting point, I will highlight African American conceptualizations
of embodiment. I propose that the novel well illustrates the tensions around
competing notions of the body, the embodied mind, and embodiment in relation
to race. Bodies in Invisible Man are contested sites of struggles as they are
always already situated in time and space, but point to a historical dimension
beyond the here and now; as they work self-efficiently and are yet indispensably
interconnected with other bodies. I thus conduct a reading based on Gail Weiss’
Body Images and Anthony Pinn’s Embodiment that both take serious these
tensions. The novel explores the ways in which the black body often accounts
for simultaneous visibility and invisibility. The hypervisibility of the black body
frequently coincides with a social and cultural invisibility and/or marginality. In
line with Linda Martín Alcoff, I work from the assumption that “race is real”
and shapes us in our individualized and nonetheless intercorporeal entireties
(“Towards a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment” 15). The interplay of and
tension between the black body as flesh and material, as socially and culturally
informed, and as a specific experience with and perception of the world that
Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes as “sedimented” and Pierre Bourdieu as
“habitual” is at the heart of the novel. It reveals the difficulties that arise from
racialized encounters but also points to chances that present themselves to alter
those sediments and habitus. Analyzing the ways in which Invisible Man frames
the black body proves fruitful for a theoretical approach to a phenomenology of
racial embodiment.
Alexandra Hartmann is currently employed as a research assistant and lecturer at
Paderborn University. In the fall of 2014, she graduated from Paderborn, majoring
in English, Theology, and Sport Science. Since 2015 she has been a PhD candidate.
Her dissertation is located in the field of Black Studies and explores the impact
of a black humanist worldview on African American literature and culture. Her
research interests further include 20th century American literature, American
intellectual history, and film.

Kathryn Holihan University of Michigan
Bodily Engagement and Exhibition Fatigue at the
1911 International Hygiene Exhibition Dresden
This paper investigates the embodied experience of the exhibition-goer at
the 1911 International Hygiene Exhibition (IHE) in Dresden. The IHE sought to
bring popular hygienic enlightenment to the urban public through aesthetic and
experiential means. It defined hygiene as the preservation and care for human
health and wellness and instructed visitors on hygienic issues ranging from
personal hygiene and nutrition, to basic knowledge about bodily functions. This
paper proffers the IHE as an exemplary site for the study of embodied experience.
In this venue, gendered bodies, laboring bodies, fetal bodies, unhealthy bodies,
and fragmented bodies were put on display for the visitor, who was meanwhile
corralled and policed by guards, stanchion ropes, and queues as they navigated
the exhibition crowd.
The study of the embodied visitor surfaces but is rarely configured in
exhibition studies, though exhibition-going is a physical act where techniques
of vision and navigation are deployed in a calculated manner. My exploration of
embodied visitor experience analyzes what Jonathan Crary deems the “observing
body.” At the IHE, the seeing body of the visitor and the exhibition display were
in constant communication. The IHE was staged for the mobile, urban inhabitant
who entered the exhibition and activated the display, making sense of its visuals
and signs. To investigate embodied visitor experience, I mine the communicative
space between visitor and display, between consumption and representation.
First, I explore the bodily experience of Ausstellungsmüdigkeit. I investigate
visitor reports on this feeling of dreariness and bodily fatigue. Indeed, visitors
wrote of the demands on their bodies: of the mental exhaustion, of the weariness
from walking the extensive grounds. And in turn, the IHE acknowledged and
responded to exhibition fatigue and the “körperliche Arbeit” of exhibition-going.
A Ruhehalle was provided for visitors, tending to their “seelische Hygiene.”
Additionally, exhibition-goers could rent cabins and reclining chairs by the hour.
Even the expenditure of the eye was considered in the exhibition’s use of sachlich
Grotesk type font for display captions. The IHE’s attentiveness to the labor of the
body had a unique valence given the nature and thematic focus of the hygiene
exhibition itself.
Next, I investigate particular moments of contact between the visitor
and display interactives. The IHE pioneered opportunities for exhibition visitor
engagement through the development of exhibition apparatuses. Within the
popular exhibit “Der Mensch,” for example, the visitor learned about the role of
blood in the body. First, the visitor observed blood samples under a microscope—
not only a cognitive, but also a sensory experience. An accompanying rubber ball
apparatus allowed the visitor to see and feel the work of the heart pumping blood
through veins and arteries, as a squeeze from the visitor sent blood through glass
pipes that ran three meters high along the exhibit wall. Through the embodied

practices of seeing and feeling—by walking the grounds and observing fellow
visitors and exhibit displays—the peripatetic visitor experienced enigmatic bodily
processes on both a personal and sensorial level.
Kathryn Holihan is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the department of
Germanic Languages & Literatures at the University of Michigan. She received
her B.A. from Oberlin College with a triple major in German, History, and Art
History. Her research interests include cultural history, exhibition culture, and the
history of the built environment. Her dissertation examines the mass appeal of
international hygiene exhibitions and the experience of the exhibition visitor.

Stephen Kuusisto Syracuse University
Many Blind Rivers: A Phenomenology of Blindness
Let us assume blindness is never static and always takes its meaning in
phenomenological terms from movement. Let us describe blindness as “Proleptic
Imagination."
Proleptic: Rhetoric. the anticipation of possible objections in order to
answer them in advance.
Traveling blind is a performance both within normative subventions of
assistance and outside cultural denotations of helplessness. This paper asserts
blind travel, taken as performance, is proleptic, both anticipating and answering
implicit objections to the concept of blind independence in the very process of
navigation. Drawing on poems and literary nonfiction this paper will demonstrate
the polysemous tropes of blind travel as they pertain to the incitement and
enactment of art while walking.
Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Planet of the Blind (a New York
Times “Notable Book of the Year”) and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness
and Listening and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light, and Letters to
Borges. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he
has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart & William Smith Colleges, and The
Ohio State University. He currently directs the Renée Crown Honors Program
at Syracuse University where he holds a professorship in the Center on Human
Policy, Law, and Disability Studies. He is a frequent speaker on disability and
diversity issues around the US and abroad.

Marlon Lieber Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/Main
Bodies and the Logic of Capital: A Reading of Ben Lerner’s 10:04
In a striking passage in Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel 10:04, its narrator—Ben—has
a bodily reaction vis-à-vis a particular commodity—a container of instant coffee—
that makes him “viscerally aware of both the miracle and insanity of the mundane
economy” (19). In short, this “alteration” of his “vision” (18) that has a corporeal
origin makes him question the “murderous stupidity” (19) of the fact that coffee
and, by implication, all kinds of goods are shipped all over the world. It seems,
then, that the novel suggests that a critical perspective on global capitalism can
have the fact that “we are bodily situated in the world” (as the Call for Papers
puts it) as a starting point. And, indeed, as the work of French sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu shows, the pre-reflexive and, hence, very much corporeal ways of
approaching the objects of the social world can go a long way in helping us to
analyze the mechanisms through which class differences are reproduced. At the
same time, 10:04 seems to suggest certain limits to a critical perspective that
proceeds from the relationship body-commodity. After all, Ben’s visceral reaction
does not ultimately lead to a questioning of the fact that products of labor (say,
instant coffee) assume the form of commodities (that can be exchanged for
money). In other words, the outcome of his bodily reaction to the “murderous
stupidity” of global commodity chains is the decision to buy local rather than to
end commodity production. Later, however, the novel introduces a relation not
between body and object, but between two objects (in this case, works of art) in
order to imagine the possibility of “material things” losing their “magical power”
when they are no longer equipped with a “monetizable signature”—that is to
say, when they are “liberated” from the “logic” of capital (133). Marx was aware
of the fact that he had to proceed not from the perspective of the individual—
and her body—but from that of the commodity or, more precisely, the relation
of exchange between two commodities in order to understand the logic of the
capitalist mode of production on the most abstract level. At the same time it
is necessary to keep in mind that Marx’s categorical critique is situated at this
abstract, conceptual level and is, thus, unable to explain a host of mechanisms
of reproduction which are taking place at a more empirically concrete level. The
point of my talk would, thus, not be to reject the role of “embodied perception”
and to defend a merely conceptual critique but to argue for awareness of the
different levels of analysis that both approaches represent.
Marlon Lieber is a doctoral candidate at Goethe-University Frankfurt, where he is
finishing a dissertation tentatively titled “’You’re not going to tell me how it turns
out?’ Colson Whitehead’s Novels and the ‘Ends of Race,’” in which he analyzes this
author’s œuvre in the light of recent discussions about African American literature
and neoliberalism. After graduating in 2013, he worked as an Assistant Professor
at Goethe-University for two years. From July to December 2015 he was a visiting

research scholar at the Department of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
He has published articles on Colson Whitehead, ‘post-blackness’/’post-raciality,’
and Leo Marx. He has also contributed to Jacobin and the Marx & Philosophy
Review of Books.

Pilar Martinez Benedi University of Rome
“Gigantic Stilts”: “Prosthetic” Embodiment and the Incorporeality of
the Body in Melville’s Moby-Dick
Chapter 35 of Moby-Dick, “The Mast-Head,” is widely considered by the critics
as emblematic of the “metaphysical” Melville. When perched upon the masthead
on the lookout for whales, Ishmael tells us, “everything resolves you into languor”
(MD 153) until you lose your identity. Lulled into listlessness, the masthead
stander’s body seems to recede, to lose its contours as his spirit ebbs away to
become “diffused through time and space” (MD 157). Bent on philosophizing,
Ishmael’s mind seems excised from his body and to float freely as it becomes one
with the All. Unsurprisingly, the attention of the critics has focused mainly on
Ishmael’s mind, and his body has joined the critical discussion only when seen as
pathological—when, at the end of the chapter a miscalculated move of foot or
hand might cause a fatal fall, bringing back the self back to awareness “in horror”
(MD 155).
Melville criticism has often stressed the metaphysical drift of “The MastHead,” largely ignoring or underestimating its pervading sensorimotor texture.
Drawing on philosopher Drew Leder’s phenomenological critique of the
Cartesian body/mind dualism (The Absent Body, 1990), I will conversely argue
that Ishmael’s “absent body” points to the materiality of Melville’s metaphysics.
Ishmael’s “corporeal disappearance” (and abrupt “dys-appearance”), in Leder’s
terms, reveals actually an instance of deep embodiment—call it “prosthetic”
embodiment. Ishmael characterizes the masts as “gigantic stilts” (MD 153) that
seem to be felt as extensions of his limbs. Not unlike Merleau-Ponty’s blind
man’s walking stick, the mast seems to have become “an area of sensitivity,
extending the scope and active radius of touch” (Phenomenology of Perception:
165) of his perched body. Acting as an everyday artifact that extends cognition
beyond bodily boundaries, the “prosthetic” masts channel a continuous flow
of kinesthetic, proprioceptive and sensory sensations that enable an organismenvironment mutuality that well accords with current views of embodied,
embedded and extended cognition.
Seizing on the idea of the “incorporeal dimension of the body” as devised
by Brian Massumi in Parables for the Virtual (2002), I propose a non-objectivist
model that emphasizes the radical openness of the body; its fluid relational and
transitional nature. Rather than emblematic of an opposition between the body

and the mind, my reading of the masthead seeks to show how Melville constantly
blurs the boundaries between the Cartesian categories of being on which he
(apparently) insistently relies. In this way, I will propose, Melville (in Moby-Dick
and elsewhere) calls into question the basic assumption of the Cartesian attitude:
the split between sensory perception and higher-order cognition, or abstract
thought, suggesting instead an orientation to experience in which categories do
not hold.
Pilar Martínez Benedí holds a J.D. from the University of Zaragoza (2000) and
a M.A. in English from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” (2012), where
she is a PhD candidate in English. (Defense expected in Fall 2016). She was the
Melville Society Archive – Walter E. Bezanson Fellow for 2012. She has spent two
residencies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an IFUSS Fellow,
in where she spent a second residency in Spring 2015. Her dissertation focuses on
the perceptual-embodied aspects of the works of Herman Melville through the
lenses of the cognitive sciences of embodiment.

Ralph Savarese Grinnell College/Iowa
“The ‘Why’ and the ‘Why Not’ of a Yellowing World”:
Autism, Literary Writing, and Synesthesia
I work at the intersection of cognitive approaches to literature and
disability studies. While there are many scholars in disability studies who adopt
a neurodiverse view of autism, they do so strictly by critiquing the discipline of
science, by insisting “on the social construction of disability.” For such scholars
the current conception of autism as lack, not autism itself, disables autistic lives.
Moreover, that conception fails to make room for another way of being in the
world. While there are many scholars in cognitive approaches to literature who
mention autism in their work, they do so strictly to illuminate typical functioning,
to show us what reading literature requires. For example, novelists exploit the
reader’s ability to infer what a character is thinking on the basis of what she is
doing with her body. Lacking theory of mind, autistics, these scholars maintain,
can’t help but struggle with an art form as intensely social and introspective as
the novel.
If disability studies frequently over-emphasizes the deterministic effects
of human culture, then cognitive science frequently overemphasizes the
deterministic effects of human physiology. The former corrects for a kind
of biological reductionism and normativity; the latter, for a kind of material
obliviousness. As a literary scholar and writer who regularly teaches creative
writing workshops to autistics and who adopted a nonspeaking six-year-old boy

with autism from foster care, a young man now double-majoring in anthropology
and creative writing at Oberlin College, I know what damage stereotypes can
do, but I also know that autistics have indisputably distinctive brains. What that
distinctiveness means and what it can do are up for grabs. In my work I thus aim to
give the progressive concept of neurodiversity some actual neurological content
and, at the same time, to push back against narrow conceptions of autistic
possibility.
In my paper I explore the phenomenon of synesthesia, which a recent study
found to be at least three times more common in autistics than in nonautistics.
Laurent Mottron’s model of “enhanced perceptual functioning” in autism
nicely dovetails with how Stephen Farmer has theorized synesthesia. Farmer
underscores “the maintenance throughout development of topographic
symmetry in brain maps as higher-level cognition is shaped by the biases of
lower-level systems.” In autistic cognition, these lower-level systems figure more
prominently than they do in non-autistic cognition. “In less extreme ways,”
Farmer writes, “all of us are synesthetes.” Recent research on synesthesia reveals
that synesthesia is “closely related to normal sensory integration going on in
everyone below the level of consciousness …. Clinical forms of synesthesia,”
Farmer argues, “simply involve higher than normal activation of synaptic links
binding analogical maps in different brain systems.” Synesthetes, in short, retain
a “heightened awareness” of these lower-level perceptual maps.” In this way, the
trope of synesthesia—for example, “your voice is so smooth”—might be thought
of as the conscious transposition of apparently distinct sensory modalities,
modalities that are in fact unconsciously and fluidly multi-sensory.
In my paper I relate the case of a radically synesthetic young man with autism
whom I mentor: Tito Mukhopadhyay. The author himself of five books, he uses a
text-to-voice synthesizer to communicate. We spent 2012-2013 discussing Moby
Dick, two chapters a week, by Skype. His synesthesia figured prominently in this
enterprise.
Ralph James Savarese is the author of Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and
Adoption, which Newsweek called “a real life love story and an urgent manifesto
for the rights of people with neurological disabilities.” It was featured on CNN’s
“Anderson Cooper 360,” ABC’s “Nightly News with Charles Gibson,” and NPR’s
“The Diane Rehm Show.” A documentary about his son, DJ, who is Oberlin
College’s first nonspeaking student with autism, will appear on PBS in late 2016.
The author of some twenty-five articles on autism, Savarese is also the co-editor
of three collections, including the first devoted to the concept of neurodiversity.
In 2012-2013, he received a Humanities-Writ-Large fellowship, which allowed him
to join the Neurohumanities Research Group at Duke University’s Institute for
Brain Sciences. While on fellowship, he investigated the science of neurodiversity.
He teaches American literature, creative writing, and disability studies at Grinnell
College in Iowa.

Bryan A. Smyth University of Mississippi
Enacting Reification:
‘False Consciousness’ as Situated Embodied (Mis)cognition
The concept of reification—denoting the misperception of dynamic
complexes and processes as things in the sense of ossified unchanging entities—
is historically central to critical theory and practice, and in recent years it has been
the object of renewed interest. But there persists an objectionable tendency to
view it in negative or privative terms—prototypically as ‘false consciousness’—
rather than as a positive phenomenon in its own right. The problem with this
does not have to do with the implicit normativity, but with the lack of insight that
such views provide into what reified experience involves concretely, in particular
concerning the active implication therein of the experiencing subject. Relying on a
traditional model of consciousness, most approaches to reification thus ultimately
construe it as a fateful kind of manipulation of passive subjects, thereby obscuring
how transformative critical practice might be motivated and effected—how, in
other words, de-reification might be achieved.
In this paper I sketch out a way of rethinking reification on the basis of
phenomenological considerations concerning the pre-reflective horizonalintentional Gestalt structure of perceptual experience, combined with resources
drawn from contemporary work on situated and embodied cognition, in particular
the dialectical framework of enactivism. The idea is to salvage the criticaltheoretic import of the concept of reification by coming to more robust material
terms with it as a form of embodied cognition—or, if you like, miscognition—
understood neither as the representation of an ontologically reified world, nor
as the ideological misrepresentation of an unreified world, but rather as the
mutually generative enactment of a world and a mode of experience based upon
the dynamic interaction between perceptual capacities and social environment.
Approaching reification in this way can shed strategic light on the possibilities and
prospects of overcoming it.
The discussion has three parts. (1) First, I present a phenomenological
account of the perceptual experience of things in general, in particular how
this account reveals the Gestalt character of perception in the sense that
discrete things are always experienced in relation to a tacitly apperceived
horizonal background. This implies treating cases of reified (i.e., normatively
problematic) thing-experience in terms of horizonal inappositeness. (2) Second,
I turn to enactivism—especially the work of Francisco Varela, Alva Noë, and
Evan Thompson—to consider how horizons supportive of reified perception
are formed and instituted in situated interaction. Crucial here is the recognition
that such horizons are compensatory in the sense that in certain conditions they
provide what R. D. Laing termed ‘ontological security’—however problematic,
the reification of the ‘natural attitude,’ even construed as a ‘second nature’, is
positively motivated from the perspective of embodied self-actualization. This
suggests that the primary issue in confronting reification concerns ‘nature’ as

a narrative of meaningfulness that forms the outermost horizon of perceptual
experience and how, if at all, this may be altered. (3) In the final part of the
paper, I take up Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo’s work on ‘participatory
sense-making’ and briefly consider how it might be applied to this dimension
of experiential horizonality—how, through embodied social interaction, we
could enactively generate an overarching sense of reality that would afford a
more normatively defensible perceptual hold on what was previously reified, yet
without insupportable loss of ontological security.
Bryan Smyth teaches philosophy at the University of Mississippi. His research
deals primarily with phenomenology and Critical Theory, in particular problems
concerning perception, embodiment, and reification. His first book, MerleauPonty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy, appeared
in 2013 (Bloomsbury), and he is currently working on two other book projects:
Hyperdialectical Materialism: Rethinking Merleau-Ponty and the Political, and
Rethinking Reification: Toward a Phenomenological Critique of Critical Theory. In
addition to other projects, he is also producing the English translation of MerleauPonty’s Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression: Cours au Collège de France,
1952-53 (Northwestern University Press).

Chris Tedjasukmana Freie Universität Berlin
Embodied Politics: Audiovisual Media and the New Publics
The “somatic turn” of the 1990s in media and cultural studies enabled
a systematic consideration of the affective dimensions of human perception
beyond cognitive processes and narrative patterning. At the same time,
phenomenological characterizations reintroduced a pre-discursive notion of
the subject and culminated in an introspective and unworldly description of film
experience as a form of “self-touching” (Vivian Sobchack).
Countering the double tendency towards an innocent and detached body, my
talk argues for a concept of embodiment that transcends the opposition between
the lived body and the mechanical machine. I understand the human body as
an entity that is both spontaneously lived and at the same time constituted
by the discursive machinery of the social. In this context, film experience may
function as a model of embodiment, which highlights the temporary suspension
of the coercion of identity. Secondly, I want to propose an alternative to the
subjectivism by re-evaluating the phenomenological notion of life-world. This
concept does not simply refer to the prior sphere of lived experience but rather to
an inherent relationship of tension: to a conflict between the intimate processes
of one’s own mortal body on the one hand, and the requirements of the societal
and public sphere, on the other. Drawing on the post-phenomenological political

theories of Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler and Marina Garcés, the productive
tension between life and world might offer an understanding of politics as
embodied and collectively shared practice that finds its expression in the recent
occupations of public squares and their complementary web 2.0-networks and
imagery.
Chris Tedjasukmana, Dr. phil., has studied Theatre, Film and Media Studies,
Philosophy and Political Science in Frankfurt, Berlin, New York City, and
Copenhagen. He is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Freie Universität Berlin,
and principal investigator of the research project “Video Activism Between
Social Media and Social Movements” (funded by the Volkswagen Foundation).
He is also a Research Fellow at the International Research Centre for Cultural
Studies (IFK) in Vienna and co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal Montage AV.
His book Mechanical Vitalization: Aesthetic Experience in Cinema was published
in 2014 in German. That same year, he received the Karsten-Witte-Award for the
Best Publication in Film Studies. Outside academia, he is part of the publishing
collective Kitchen Politics: Queerfeminist Interventions.

Gail Weiss University of Washington
Feeling Differently:
Cultivating Anti-Discriminatory Perceptual Habits
One of the most striking features of the natural attitude, as Edmund
Husserl describes it, is that it is not natural at all, but rather, is a developmental
phenomenon that is acquired through, and profoundly influenced by, specific
socio-cultural practices. As the largely unquestioned set of habitual beliefs
and behaviors that establish the parameters for “normal” experience for both
individuals and communities, the natural attitude is culturally, geographically,
and historically variable. Yet, even if we acknowledge that contingent events
may have influenced the formation of a given natural attitude, and even if we
are aware of major differences that may distinguish one person’s or community’s
natural attitude from another, this recognition does not usually prevent our own
natural attitudes from being naturalized, that is, accepted as natural. Insofar as
our natural attitudes reveal, as Husserl informs us, not only a practical world but

also a world of values, they supply the normative standards we implicitly appeal
to on an ongoing basis in our daily lives. It should not be surprising, then, that
the embodied, ethical norms associated with a given natural attitude also tend to
be naturalized, or presupposed as givens. This naturalization and normalization
of our own natural attitudes, I maintain, poses significant challenges to any
movement for serious social change since the latter almost always requires
dramatic changes in our natural attitudes, and in turn, the expression of new
feelings, according to which accepted norms of the past, whether on the part of
individuals or larger communities, no longer appear to be natural or justified.
Turning to the visceral experience of her own white skin privilege that
Beauvoir recounts in her memoir, America Day by Day, I maintain that she not only
de-naturalizes anti-black racism, but also reveals an existential responsibility that
extends beyond one’s own actions and one’s own natural attitude to encompass
not only the attitudes and actions of other people but also the society in which
one is immersed even if, as in Beauvoir’s case, this is not one’s own native
country. In contrast to traditional, liberal accounts that emphasize personal
autonomy and thus associate responsibility exclusively with one’s own actions
and intentions, Beauvoir’s account reveals an excess of responsibility for antiblack racism that overruns bodily borders, flowing not only from body to body but
also between bodies and societies.
Two years before her 1947 trip to the U.S., Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in
the Phenomenology of Perception that “an attitude towards the world, when it has
received frequent confirmation, acquires a favoured status for us.” (PhP 441) This
latter account, I suggest, offers us a way of understanding how racist attitudes
are confirmed and sedimented in our bodies over time, becoming self-fulfilling
prophecies for those who express them. Taken together, I argue, Beauvoir’s antiliberal expansion of bodily responsibility beyond the body proper and MerleauPonty’s account of the sedimentation of attitudes in the habit body reveal the
intercorporeal, ethical challenges posed by racism, homophobia, sexism, and
disability for all members of a society, including those who are most committed to
combatting them.
Gail Weiss is Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University
and General Secretary of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle. She is the
author of two monographs: Refiguring the Ordinary (Indiana U. Press, 2008)
and Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (Routledge 1999) and
she has edited/co-edited four other volumes: Intertwinings: Interdisciplinary
Encounters with Merleau-Ponty (SUNY 2008), Feminist Interpretations of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (Penn State Press 2006), Thinking the Limits of the Body (SUNY
2003), and Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture
(Routledge 1999). She has published numerous journal articles, book chapters
on embodiment and co-edited a Special Issue of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist
Philosophy on “The Ethics of Embodiment” in Summer 2011. She is currently
completing a monograph on Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir.